# Ethereum Governance: Showcase and Tools by Hudson Jameson (Devcon4)

- Speakers: Hudson Jameson
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2019-10-09
- Duration: 10:37
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-dqFqOmWzw8M
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqFqOmWzw8M

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/ethereum-governance-showcase-and-tools

Governance is hard, especially in a blockchain community. This breakout session aims to educate participants on the history, major groups, and interactive tools around Ethereum governance. We will have representation from major governance bodies such as the Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians, EIP editors, and core developers. The activities in the breakout session will include short presentations from each governance group, a Q&A session, and demos of software and tools used in the governance process, such as exciting new voting/signaling tools.

Speaker(s): Hudson Jameson
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Society and Systems
Keywords: governance

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

I'm here to talk about a theory of governance or one of the many ways to think about aetherium governance I suppose less philosophical it's entirely what is happening today who are the organizations involved what's the history of it first a little bit about me I have been involved in cryptocurrency since about 2011 I worked at a bank for a few years then aetherium Foundation and I co-founded Oken innovations and served as an adviser there I have one wife Laura top-left and three cats top right is Viviane bottom left is fry and bottom right is Li Lu so I'm gonna start with Vlad's definition of governance it's the process by which we attempt to establish the legitimacy of decisions decision-making processes and related governance norms and expectations I just like that definition a lot so I wanted to throw it into my slides I think it makes it really I think it really boils it down well for what most blockchain governance discussions kind of come down to in a way so that's just kind of how I feel about the definition okay so let me give you a history of kind of what governance or the you know powers of aetherium what-what that was back in the day so 2014 early 2015 all clients and development tools were developed by the etherium foundation all the co-founders were there all the first developers Devcon zero had about 50 people and that's kind of where it was all centralized you can think of it that way granted it was so small such a small project you can't really blame it for not being decentralized yet 2015 to 2016 outside entities started to form and leave the etherium foundation we had stuff like consensus happening parity happened around 2016 I believe and other stuff like that and just keeping time and then 2016 Enterprise aetherium discussion started on a Skype chat between a lot of enterprises who are starting to get interested in it and then eventually the etherium Enterprise Alliance formed more infrastructure is now being developed by third parties we have meta masks we have in fira they probably started a little bit before 2016 but you should you start seeing them be a lot more used and then 2017 Enterprise aetherium brings traditional companies into aetherium and that's more visible from a government and academic interest perspective you have ic3 from Cornell University you have Stanford Harvard the Cambridge is another big one UCLA there's just a lot of different blockchain organizations within colleges and academic institutions now what is it now it is vitalik holding a lambo okay so this is my favorite slide because it's the most aesthetically pleasing because it looks like stair steps like climbing down and I didn't plan for it that way until I noticed that all of them could do that so yeah my favorite slide here the current major players in the ecosystem that kind of contribute to a lot of the decisions being made the direction that etherium is going things like that consensus is a big hub and spoke model I guess a company organization conglomerate whatever you want to call it and it has a bunch of different teams that all work you know across teams and come up with their own projects and then eventually some of them spin out into their own companies others stay in and provide infrastructure it's kind of a very it's very hard to pin down what consensus is unless you've worked there so Oh even though you don't know okay yeah so then there's the web 3 Foundation which is working really hard across different technologies including Definity aetherium obviously polka dot and others to bring about the web 3 future that's been envisioned by people like Gavin wood in the past parody technologies they build the second biggest aetherium client that was founded by Gavin wood as one of the spin-offs from aetherium foundation the etherium foundation they're hosting Def Con I think they're pretty cool I work there and what they do is they provide funding support grants other things to the etherium ecosystem it's pretty much all about supporting the eCos system and making sure things get done AEA that's for enterprise aetherium people fellowship of ethereal magicians is a disorganization as force but it of people coming together to make technical standards or to not make but to basically review and talk about technical and sometimes philosophical standards within aetherium we have the client devs they get together during the all core developer meetings which I'll show you a little bit more about a second that is those client devs you know have a lot of input and they don't even always want it but that's kind of what they end up doing then we have a theory of improvement proposal editors this is like our IETF standards and I'm an EIP editor so is Nick Johnson for instance and Greg Colvin who's around here somewhere and so then there's also highly used infrastructure tools such as in fear of my crypto and meta masks and they have a good say in the ecosystem as well here's an example of a IPS there's the front page of the e ip's repo it says you know the status terms how to contribute the types and again the most famous example of any IP is the ERC 20 token standard which defines the most basic type of token you can have in the etherium ecosystem that's cross-compatible via the smart contracts it produces this is a screenshot of the core developer call this one in particular had about 30 people because it was a very contentious issue about issuance reduction or developer meetings happen every two weeks on Fridays I think it's like 10 a.m. eastern US time and what we do is we try not to talk about controversial topics unless we absolutely have to but it's all about low-level client and protocol development stuff what's the next hard Fork happening how do we fix the network layer if there's something wrong what are we going to do whenever Rob stand messes up what's everyone's client updates every time there's a new client that comes out such as Pantheon such as X the areum we invite them to the call at this point I believe there is nine clients that are compatible with the current etherium network which is incredible and all of them are represented on this call the all core devs call kind of sparked other calls including the e wasum community call the plasma implementers call and the f implementers 2.0 call death and lunar 2.0 call is incredibly interesting because it's people from across many many different ecosystem organizations plasma and pointers calls well is very very diverse I would say it's hard for Vitalik to keep up attending all of these because he's definitely someone who would be valued at all of these but there's just too many calls now too many here's the problems the IPS in the all core devs meetings are the only formal way where the decisions are made the most technical stuff we don't have enough people to actually help us out on these things there's the same people making decisions over and over again because there's a lot to understand at the very complicated underlying aetherium protocol and we have a few good signaling systems or other methods to gauge community consensus whenever things happen you can think back to the dow for example that was a very hard decision at the time I can go on all day about the Dow but the point is it was hard to gauge the community sentiment at the time and then eventually the call was made for what defaults were presented on the clients to go forward solution involve more diverse groups and participants make a loaf of Doge bread create safe places for people to discuss things encourage participation and outspoken opinions so safe places for discord is important because we don't want to become toxic like a Bitcoin just straight up so in order to do that we need to have like variety of places where we're all you know just nice to each other and not encourage participation and outspoken opinions same vein just listen to people more governance structures aetherium magicians came in and I believe they're saving the day right now because we just had the all core dev meetings in the IPS and now they're coming in to really help structure the future of a IPS and other governance things with their rings model which you may hear about later and then continuous improvement on current structures we're always trying to improve the court have meetings the EEI peace process things like that are we centralized nope were too disorganized to be centralized what can we do don't panic we needed to develop good governance structures I truly believe that the idea of figureheads are good early on in a blockchain project but influence needs to be lessened over time specifically in the case of Vitalik you know he's been basically the earlier on he had a lot more influence and today he's stepping back into more of a research role and you won't even see him on the core dev calls you won't see him commenting on major issues as much anymore he's out of the decision-making process in a lot of ways and I think that's great and I think that's purposeful and I mean I've confirmed that's purposeful from him so that's something that I think is really really important for the ecosystem to thrive and become more decentralized and more people takeover and then look at traditional Ike old school things like IETF and see how they're running and what you can do about things like rough consensus I'm at Hudson Jameson on Twitter and at Hudson Jameson comm thank you all so much I hope I didn't go over my time you